


Moments of Inertia

by alteringegoism



Category: One Direction (Band), Zayn Malik (Musician)
Genre: Angst, Drama, Hubris, M/M, Niall (We) deserved better, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-21
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-06 11:04:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6751414
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alteringegoism/pseuds/alteringegoism
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He was over it. Done with everything. Time to move on and leave 1D and all the bullshit behind, to build the life he's always wanted and become the person and artist he was always meant to be.</p><p>But it turns out, changing yourself is about as easy as changing the past. Zayn learns the hard way what everyone else knew all along.</p><p>There are a lot of nice, loving fics about Zayn leaving the band. This isn't one of them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moments of Inertia

The gold fleur de lis pattern woven into the burgundy carpet swirled dizzily beneath Zayn's unsteady feet. The walls of cream damask wallpaper bordered by rococo inspired crown mouldings tilted and closed in on his hunched, shivering body. Zayn swiped at his dripping nose with the back of his bare forearm and dug the swell of his knuckle into his red rimmed eyes. All the while, one leaden foot staggered on after the other down the long stretch of hallway.

Breathing too was a labour here. The too cold, too crisp, artificially conditioned air of the hotel prickled sharp inside his lungs after escaping from the moist, fragrant streets of Phuket. A hint of damp, of mould and must lingered underneath like something dead and decaying. Zayn crossed his skinny, naked arms over his stomach. Dirt and vice darkened fingernails scrabbled at his sides. The thin, white vest that stretched over his torso offered little protection from all the things that assailed him.

The mobile shoved inside the pocket of his too tight jeans vibrated practically nonstop. Tweets, texts, and taunts no doubt raced along wires and through airwaves to chip away at him bit by bit. Not content with merely irritating his thigh, the dull buzz travelled up along raw nerves to reverberate inside his head. It rattled around the empty, aching cavity devoid of the brain that surely must have deserted him. How else to explain such a night and all its disastrous going-ons?

The first thing Zayn did after he finally fumbled his key card into the slot and shoved open the door to his hotel room was pitch the incessant electronic halfway across the room. It landed face down with a thud. The chiming alerts and flashing lights of his trending miseries muffled into the thick pile.

Grabbing hundred pound t-shirts and stuffing them haphazardly next to pairs of jeans worth easily more than four times as much, Zayn packed up his suitcase in the hush of late night and near darkness. Only the dim and distant light from a bedside lamp shone upon the mess on his hands. Balled up and hopelessly wrinkled cloth tangled with twisted charging cords and pressed up against uncapped bottles of cologne and hair gel. None of that shit mattered in the least bit as long as Zayn got himself 5,000 miles away from here. His face and his latest transgressions splashed across all the local newspapers would be all that remained of him in this godforsaken place.

The door opened again behind him, but Zayn failed to hear it intent as he was on removing every trace of himself from the room. 

"Zayn, what're you doing? Is everything alright?"

The voice was unabashedly concerned, unmistakably Irish, and among the last of which Zayn wished to hear right then, to see him like this. Though it had not seemed possible a second ago, his back bowed lower, his last hopes of escaping undetected evaporating like tropical morning mist. Zayn scrubbed a heavy hand over his drawn features, but did not turn, did not welcome this intrusion. The harried packing continued in silence. He set his rigid back to Niall. In many ways, it was no less than the other deserved, for all that he'd done, or hadn't done for Zayn this night and the many like it spent alone in silence leading up to it.

"If this is 'bout tonight—"

Zayn's head snapped up and around at that. "Tonight was nothing," he hissed. The thin line of his upper lip lifted and curled back into an ugly snarl. Bone white teeth flashed in the shadows. "I can't—I  _won't—_ stand here listening to you of all people harping on about it."

The slap of a dogeared notebook into the suitcase underscored the end of the statement. His empty hands curled into fists at his sides. The veins and tendons in his arms, his neck, popped in stark lines of exclamation. "I'm so completely sick of this fucking life, of everything and everyone! Sick of 'em pushing and prodding and talking shit about things they know nothing about. Always making them into more than what they are."

Niall recoiled from the pure venom in Zayn's tone, his blue eyes widening and pale throat rearing open to the other's whetted gaze. The moment of vulnerability however, didn't prevent Niall from stepping forward and firing back in the next. "Stupid me, here I didn't think you considered me just  _anyone_. But you can fuck right off with your victim bullshit. No one held a gun to your head, mate. You made your own choices."

A hint of a mouth shaped bruise peeking over the edge of Niall's loose sleep shirt and nestled in the hollow under the sharp jut of his left collarbone caught Zayn's attention. So while Zayn had been abandoned like carrion to the paps who continuously circled them, Niall had clearly gotten up to something a lot less innocent than the sleep he had excused himself with. The newly formed and darkly intimate mark provided a convenient outlet for his righteously impotent fury. "Not about to stand here and listen to a slag lecture me about choices,  _mate_."

"The fuck does that mean?"

They stood shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, and with feet firmly planted within each other's spheres. The two of a similar height, their faces just about perfectly aligned. But the calm centre that Niall had always been for Zayn in this maelstrom of a life that they shared was no longer to be found in the other's hard drawn mouth, the glacial eyes, the whitened face. Unmoored and disoriented at this latest loss, this final straw, the hot, rapid uprise of his own anger sent Zayn spinning.

The laughter that Zayn unleashed was low, hard, and mean. "Never really have to choose, do you, when you'll stick your dick into anything that moves?" The quickened huff of alcohol sour breath seeped into the divide tearing open between them before their very eyes. The poison flowed freely down the cracks. "Tell me, how's it feel to know that no one's ever really chose you either? Always the pathetic, perennial fallback plan."

Niall inhaled sharply and jerked backwards out of physical reach. His expression crumpled and paper thin, translucent lids blinked rapidly over glassy eyes. The hard knot twisting inside of Zayn's chest thrummed with jealous, vindictive pleasure.

Just as quickly, Niall's face smoothed over. The walls that they all learned to erect over the years went up thick and impenetrable. They could have been discussing their favourite song on the album or the best venue to perform in for the umpteenth time for all that it showed in those lustreless blue eyes. When Niall picked up the thread of the conversation, he spoke in the same casual and congenial tone that he took on with fans and interviewers alike."You know what, Zayn? Fuck you for coming back tonight at all if this is how you were going to act. Fuck you for making me think—"

A hitch in his breath was his only stumble, the smallest of cracks in his polished veneer. Zayn tried to look through it to find the boy that he knew, that knew him in return, but like a ripple in a pond it quickly flowed out of view. Blank stillness was left in its wake. "Just fuck you, Zayn," Niall said, the slash of his lips quirking up into a slight smile as if around a congenial word of greeting or farewell. Little else seemed forthcoming from the other.

His full suitcase beckoning more urgently than ever, Zayn returned to it. He slammed the lid shut, his fingers slipping on and fumbling about with the zip. He stood hot, exhausted, and trembling by the time he got it closed. Unable to bear another second in this room, in this savage country, with this cold stranger standing in front of him in judgment, Zayn heaved his suitcase onto the floor more than ready to walk away and leave it all behind. But not without one more word to the person who should have been in his corner. "You know what, Niall? Fuck you too. I can't deal with your bullshit right now." He ripped the plastic handle up.

"Hold the presses! Zayn Malik fails to deal with something!" Niall mocked. He crossed his arms over his chest and his still smiling mouth sank at one corner into a smirk. As Zayn rolled past him in his cloud of harried silence, Niall pivoted lazily on his heel, gaze hot on his back. "When are you coming back then?"

Zayn didn't answer and continued on to the door.

"So this is how it ends, is it?"

Zayn couldn't answer. His tongue was a heavy weight that flailed uselessly about and failed to form any words of substance. Bitterness and anger and fear flooded his mouth. He choked on it.

Niall spoke again in that same distantly agreeable voice. He did not look up from the ragged nails he ripped and picked away at. "Can't wish you unhappiness, mate. That's not me. But I do hope that you never forget this moment, because you should know that I won't."

Those words chased after Zayn's heels in a way that the other clearly refused to do. Through the entrance, down the hall, out of their lives. The door closed behind him,  _not with a bang but a whimper._

* * *

Days pass; the respite Zayn expected to find in London those first few weeks spent in hiding simply isn't there. The thought of having to go back to that life, to stand in front of the bright lights and before a million pairs of expectant eyes, and one particularly blue set, feels like rubbing grains of salt into his open wounds. So Zayn just...doens't.

The world implodes. Angry tweets and messages flood his inbox. Vitriol spills out from the four corners of the globe, and from three lads in particular, in turns bewildered, furious, and hurt. One remains conspicuously silent. Zayn tries to tell himself that this doesn't sting most of all.

Zayn refashions his days in slow unhurried quiet. He wakes when he wants; no urgent responsibilities bang down his locked door and demand things from him that are no longer within him to give. He has dinners with his mum and dad and sisters most nights in the house paid in full for and stretches out like a fat, contented feline on the sofa he bought them afterwards. The murmur of the telly and their chatter seep into him like the mist of the sweetest dream. Or was everything that came before the dream? It already seems like another world to him, another life finished and buried.

Now that he can choose the company he keeps, Zayn surrounds himself with people he _knows_ he can trust. A long overdue tropical getaway with Perrie is among the first of his plans; just him and his beautiful, blond fiance jetsetting into paradise and with no way for the jealous fucks that hound him on twitter and Instagram to follow. The two love birds in turn fuck like rabbits on the beach, in the pool, and on every level to moderately tilted surface in their secluded villa, Zayn often with his eyes closed so that he doesn't have to look into a pair that are one shade off from the right blue. In the dark, he tells himself that it all feels the same.

Back in London again, Zayn rolls into the recording studio with an enthusiasm that he hasn't felt in at least three years. Now that he's making music that actually has some soul and working with a producer that truly understands him as an artist, it's no longer a chore to show up on time and put in the long hours to get a new track done right.

The public sniping via twitter with Louis that happens shortly after is admittedly not his finest moment, but Liam's jab on Instagram, unintentional or not, at being replaced stings more than Zayn cares to admit. The small (big) and protective (petty) part of him revolts at the idea of some interloping tosser stepping into his trainers and taking  _his_ hugs,  _his_ toothy smiles, and  _his_ gentle, three point gesture of affection spanning across the heart and down to the core. Surely Zayn isn't as interchangeable as that?

In the ensuing weeks of silence and reflection that follow however, the certainty, the rightness, the righteousness of his actions and path no longer seem quite so clear cut as they once were. It starts off with small on their own nearly unnoticeable things. This is the longest he's been around Perrie consecutively in years and he's not sure if her voice has always been this shrill, or if it's a newer development that crept up on him so gradually that it reached ear-rupturing levels before it finally registered. Had the gloom of his former life clouded his perceptions that much? It begs the question, how much more has he missed then, gotten wrong?

The thing is, in the quiet moments, when they don't have flash bulbs going off in their carefully made up faces, when they aren't posing as England's hottest young couple, they don't really have much to talk about that isn't the weather—damp, overcast, and always fringe flattening—or their latest purchases—embossed calfskin, stamped rose gold, and increasingly redundant. As it stands, music is no longer a bridge between them; the last thing that Zayn wants to go on and on about is teeth rotting bubblegum pop music when he fought so hard to extricate himself from its cloying stranglehold. Fought and _won._ Only, he hadn't anticipated that the dust settling would reveal a landscape quite so bleak as this.

It's difficult too going from full tilt at a hundred miles per hour to truly settling into this sedate and solitary pace. Whenever he packs a bowl, it's still for two and in the haze of his first exhale Zayn will turn to hand it off to the phantom that is the only thing to be found at his back. Then there are the moments of silence that stretch out into infinity without that steady, non-sequitur telling presence at his elbow to fill them with charming if empty chatter. The contents of his stomach have been reduced to acidic coffee and the noxious smoke and tar of cigarettes without the constant reminders to stay hydrated and eat his greens. And the last—but never, ever the least—of what and who is no longer there to stand at his side...well, he simply doesn't bear thinking about. There are just so many unexpected things to miss that Zayn finds himself unable to keep track of them all. They pile upon him nonetheless like a haphazard mound of sand, no individual grain responsible for the eventual landslide.

The radio silence from everybody but Liam on rare occasion further weighs upon his flagging spirit. The others don't call, text, or so much as mention him on social media or in interviews. In a way, it's like he was never there, as if the last five years never happened. It's harder than he thought, to accept being so easily erased. When he walked away, Zayn never imagined that he would be the one being left behind.

It goes from bad to worse when Zayn catches wind of the boys' next album release mere months after their official parting. The silver lining to all this shit is that he finally has something to talk about at length,  _ad nauseam,_ with Perrie whenever she pops round demanding his attention and affection. Every appearance, advert, concert footage, interview, and even fan made video of the boys is scrutinized and dissected over morning espresso, at the mixing table, as his nightly contribution to pillow talk. 

The new motivational poster inked into Liam's hand gets a scoff lightly tinged with fondness. Louis' baby drama gives Zayn plenty to snigger and secretly sympathize about in the weeks after the news breaks. Harry's seemingly disconnect from everyone including, even, especially, Niall is deeply and darkly satisfying. And lastly, Zayn pours over Niall's porcelain mask of indifference for any hint of pressure building beneath the surface. He lies in wait for a moment where Niall might break open to this covetous gaze.

It's a foolish, destructive thing he does, but Zayn gets his hands on a leaked copy of the boys' first single off their first album without him.  _Drag Me Down_ is both better and worse than anything he could have ever imagined. The tune is rocking. They sound good, great even; as much as he might want to deny it, Zayn can't. The transition from five to four is nearly seamless and he's happy for them really,  _extremely_ so, but he'd be lying if he said he didn't want them to go through some growing pains without him. Surely, it isn't wrong to want tangible evidence that he was a necessary part of them and sorely missed. Zayn's never claimed to be anything more or less than an ordinary man.

Perhaps it's that same human ego of his that leads him into reading deeper into it, but the lyrics hit him hard like a personal affront. All he can hear in their voices is defiance and rejection blending in perfect harmony. All he can picture is Niall's closed off face in the moment before he let Zayn walk out the door. This isn't how Zayn wants to remember them. This isn't how he wants Niall to think of him, if he even does anymore. More and more, Zayn  _needs_ him to.

One evening in the middle of lounging carefully casual in front of Graham Norton, half smoked fag burning up in the glass tray beside him and ice cubes diluting his scotch to pale yellow, Zayn gives wings to the fledgling idea that's been hatching inside his brain for the better part of the week. Their eyes are facing forward. He tells Perrie slowly, with a shy bite of lip, that maybe he wants to reach out to the boys, to mend any fences he may have impetuously bulldozed down in his rush for freedom. Growing enthusiasm quickens his drawl and crinkles the corners of his eyes. He's sitting up straight by this point. The muscles in his forearms flex through the whorls of ink as he gesticulates. Maybe Zayn owes it to them all, including himself, to try.

"Oh, love. Don't be so foolish."

The pitying tone registers on Zayn before the words do like a splash of ice water to an unsuspecting face. He's left blinking and stuttering and partially blinded by his own incredulity. His insides feel frozen with it. In the face of his dazed confusion, his fiance is happy to elucidate on her point. She scoots over closer on the cushions. Her pink shellac tipped hands flit across his knee.

"Baby," Perrie coos in the shell of his ear. Her long, sooty lashes flutter like moth wings. "You know I only want what's best for you, to save you the trouble and the heartbreak. Whatever you're thinking, whatever mad scheme you're inventing, it isn't going to work. It's over." She pats at him over and over in what she likely thinks is a consoling manner, lightly, barely there on the sharp point of jutting cartilage.

Unmindful of his nails digging crescent moons into the expensive leather of the armrest, Zayn pushes up onto his feet. His fiance's hand falls away from him, rises up again part way, then apparently thinks better of the half-hearted reach and drops back into her lap. Zayn looms overhead. Hot, pulsing denial crawls like gooseflesh across Zayn's skin and spills over from twisting lips. "What the fuck is this, Perrie? Aren't you supposed to be on my side? I don't even know what the fuck you're trying to get at here, but I won't hear another word of it."

His fiance stands as well after that, her long legs uncrossing, smooth and unhurried. Then she laughs in his face, a high pitched and grating bray of noise. Perrie smacks him gently on the cheek with those pales fingers and smile. Her teeth form a hard wall of white. "No need to get in a strop, my love. All I'm saying is that what's done is done. That's the simple truth whether you want to hear it or not. There is no going back, not for me, and definitely not for you."

Zayn shakes his head so hard that his jaw rattles. The air heaves out of him until all that is left is churning bile. His chin dips and angles to the right of Perrie, gaze sliding further still past the blond. He can't look at her. His eyes are tight and hot and beginning to sting. All pretense of gentleness is melting away. "You've no clue what you're going on about. You're just talking shit like everyone else. Never could stand to see me happy, could you? You always were jealous of my relationship with them. Well let me tell you right now that you know fuck all about it. They're still my boys."

"Zayn, love, you left—"

"Shut the fuck up!" Zayn takes in great, deep breaths, but nothing seems to fill up the hollows inside. "I mean it, Perrie. Not another fucking word!" He's pulling at his hair now; a poor substitution for what he can't do to her. But the pressure and stinging in his scalp is the only thing keeping him from imploding into nothingness. 

Undeterred by his outburst, Perrie stills his yanking hands and takes them between both of her milk white ones. At the tip of them, the nails are hardened gloss pink and sharpened to points. The three chunks of carbon protruding high from her left ring finger—base element compressed to brilliant hardness from millions of years of pressure and set in lustrous matrimonial platinum—return a dizzying flash of fire to his sensitive eyes. Zayn averts his gaze upward. Those light blue, steady eyes are waiting to capture his, but Zayn's can't quite rise high enough to meet them. Perrie parts her painted lips, and looking down into that red, wet, gaping cavity makes Zayn sick to his stomach.

He rips his hands away; he cannot stop their spasming. "Get out."

Perrie's gaze on him remains steady, her mouth partly open as if still intent on speech and argument, but in the end she merely shrugs. Her lips meet in a firm, straight line. She tuts at him on her way out in a mothering way. Her eyes are clear and so startlingly bright at the threshold that they hurt. "May I suggest you sleep on it before doing anything rash?" Her smile is serene. "Trust me on this, love. I know you better than anyone."

The door slams closed behind Perrie's back, helped along by a heavy press of his palm. Zayn's foot lashes out at the unyielding wood. The throbbing in his toes is yet another pain to be laid at Perrie's treasonous feet. He prowls around his flat for the remainder of the night. His glass of lukewarm, piss yellow scotch and the few framed pictures of him and Perrie that he gets his hands on meet the wall in a shower of iridescent shards. The pieces fall where they may and remain there. He drinks the rest of the scotch with his fingers strangling the neck of the bottle. The sky is a dim shade of cerulean when Zayn is finally able to fall asleep sprawled out in the middle of his bed, though he cannot see it lost in reverie and with his forearm laid as it is as a shield across his eyes. 

* * *

Zayn awoke in smothering darkness. His chest clothed in only a thin vest heaved as he sat straight up in the middle of an empty bed. Thick cotton sheets pooled in his lap. Cold sweat clung to the hollows of his body and dampened his brow. His hands curled stiffly around his bent knees, a lingering nightmare rigour mortis. The impressions of his dreams, shadows upon shadows, darkened the edges of his vision, a cold desolate landscape where he was left all alone. The back of his throat rasped for water. He needed something to wash away the fetid sourness that coated and thickened his mouth and made it so very hard to breathe.

Zayn kicked the top sheet aside, the crisp fabric crinkling and hissing as expensive cloth does while sliding from his lap. Had his head not been so full of evaporating dreams, it might have occurred to him to wonder where his heavy down duvet had gotten to—a build consisting mostly of narrow bones and thin skin made him particularly prone to chill in the English clime that was his home. But the air was warm that night and he had no thought for something as mundane as the normal, proper temperature as he dropped his feet to the carpeted floor. Nor did he register the unexpected sensation of lush pile cradling his toes and heels where there should only have been smooth, solid hardwood. Zayn lurched up in a daze, legs stiff from the constricting denim that encased them, and stumbled through the heavy blackness to where he knew his ensuite bathroom to be. 

Two steps to the right, three forward, and his hand met not the cool, metallic door handle that should have been there, but a satiny expanse of wall. Raised bumps from patterned wallpaper ran under his searching fingertips like braille. Zayn's hand stilled upon the flat, solid surface. The incredulous digits began to tremble.

Zayn scrambled backwards across the carpet. The tops of the back of his knees hit the edge of the bed—his own modern, low-profile bed sat much lower than that. In a sideways stumble, his clawed hands pulled him along the cold, smooth sheets until they hit a wooden bedside table a little taller and narrower than the ones to be found inside his bedroom. Shaking fingers searched out the wooden surface and found the base of a heavy lamp. After three frantic passes over and around the slim metal body, Zayn flicked the lamp's tiny switch and illuminated the nooks and crannies of a room that he had walked out of almost four months prior. Another lifetime ago.

The room had not changed; all of its details were inexorably tied up with that night and thus seared in memory. There were the deep red curtains with its fussily braided tieback tassels, the gold brocade wingback armchair in the corner and elaborately carved and curved ivory sofa, both liberally strewn with his shit. They had laughed into each other's shoulders, him and Niall, at the over-saturation of quasi French touches in their Thai hotel, like words that had been translated through two or three languages and then back again so that they were base caricatures of themselves. Zayn laughed now, a high, bubbling chortle that sounded hollow and from some place far away to his own ears.

Through the same removed lens, Zayn watched his hand pick up the mobile phone lying innocuously dark and silent next to the lamp on top of the the night table. Unmistakably  _his_ phone. Index finger moving by route, it swiped a pattern through the little white dots on the screen that only he would know. The phone flared to brighter life with a soft chirp of recognition. The frozen, smiling faces of him and the boys shone up at him from the background.

Behind the apps and numbers, the icons and letters, the five of them were sat in a car. The whole of that time Zayn could picture easily enough, the cameras and mic booms, the posed jocularity, the hawking of a middling product that he had never learned the name of, let alone would ever purchase. Another in a very long line of adverts and appearances and campaigns. He had chosen that picture specifically as a reminder of easier times for when the puppet strings pulled too tight and the quarters grew too close, the all looked so genuinely happy with each other.

But staring at it now, Zayn could not summon to mind that exact memory. He could not remember what came before: a word, a jest, an order from the director. Nor what came after, whether a laugh, or convivial silence, or perhaps, more than likely, a return to irritation or at best indifference. That fleeting second of cheer no longer existed, if it ever truly had, all the truth of it gone but for the digital imprint in his hand.

Unlike this moment, this night that had been immortalized in tabloids and in the collective memories of millions so that there was no mistaking or forgetting. This moment that Zayn somehow stood on the cusp of all over gain. The date, that infamous day in March, was stamped plainly and impossibly across the top of the screen.

The phone dropped from his fingers and made little noise upon hitting the mattress. Neither did Zayn's feet in their steady plod across the floor. He stopped at the thick curtains shielding him from the balcony and the outside world. In one fluid movement, he threw them open. Twinkling lights of halogen yellow, fluorescent white, LED red, and neon blue illustrated the skyline of the vibrant Asian city spread out at his feet. The glass under his trailing fingertips was thick, solid, and cold. He pushed the sliding doors open. Reality and humid air heavy with an underlying sweetness of sin steamrolled over him. A cacophony of honking cars and reveling people broke the silence encasing the room.

Zayn finally awoke to all that lay before him.

Rushing back to the bed, balcony door left open behind him to the bustling night and the invading wind whipping about the limp strands of his hair, Zayn scooped up his phone and checked the time again. It was just after 11 that night. Right before he and Louis had left for the evening and the beginning of the end of it all. Time enough now to set everything right. The phone dropped to the bed once more.

In his haste to don his trainers and be on his way, Zayn forewent socks and gave his quiff only the briefest of fluffings in front of the full length mirror. The deja vu sight of his younger self adorned in the same vest and jeans and the veil of ignorance gave him another short pause. That after tonight, that boy would no longer exist spurred him on to his destination.

Words ran through his head, how he would greet the other, how he would apologize for things never done, for things not yet done. His feet carried him along down the corridor and past the right number of doors. They instinctively travelled a path that he had mapped out in his imaginings in increasing frequency in the months since their parting. Zayn stopped and knocked.

The flat of his fist struck the wood with numerous quick and short motions. If he was interrupting something on the other side, best to get it over with. The door finally swung open to reveal Niall's pillow-creased, drowsily curious face. The tension leeched from Zayn's spine like the air from a slow leaking tyre and his shoulders relaxed into a slope more casual. Over Niall's bare, beauty mark dotted shoulder, the room and sleep mused bed proved empty. Whatever the outcome from his visit tonight, here at least he'd seen with his own eyes that Niall had begged off from him with nothing less than the truth. Niall hadn't wilfully thrown him over for Liam or Harry or a thousand other faceless and petty excuses that would never be good enough reasons. Tonight had all been a misunderstanding, one that Zayn would intercept and rectify. They could put their growing distance behind them and prevent all that future ugliness.

"Zayn? What's up? Thought you'd be out painting the town red by now."

Zayn shook his head and could not keep a smile from stretching his mouth open and showing a shy hint of teeth. "That was the original plan, but I decided I wanted to come see you instead." His fingers rubbed reflexively at the back of his neck, his chin dipping into his neck so that he when he peered up at Niall, it was through his lashes.

Niall stifled a yawn into his hand while stepping away from the door. He left it open behind him as he walked to the bed, trusting that Zayn would follow through and still be there when he turned around again. Each step that Zayn carefully set down past the threshold felt heavy with the weight of those expectations.

"Where's Louis at? Was pretty psyched about the clubs, wasn't he? Sure he won't be mad you're ditching 'im?"

"Don't matter," Zayn said, a little too quickly, a little too loud into the slow, sleepy quiet of the night. The door swung shut under its own weight, a low clatter of hinges and latches. After turning down the lights, he toed off his trainers. The first barrier shed. "I wanted to be here, so here I am." He shrugged out of his white vest, the next layer gone.

Niall glanced sideways at him from beside the bed, pointed blue tracing the patterns on his chest and then roving up to his face. He snorted. "Figures." He slid into bed straight under the covers, his tired but easy grin peeking up at him over the edge of the cloth. "We just had it off, what, three days ago? Are you really that hard up again so soon?"

"If it's for you," Zayn said. At once, his cheeks flushed a colour so deep it was easily discernible even through his darker skin and the dimness of the room. He wiggled his hips and slowly angled them away while he removed his jeans so that the telltale blush faced the opposite direction.

A state of undress between them was nothing new, nothing remarkable. Even with the rest of the boys whose relationships lacked the depth of _intimacy_ of his and Niall's, cramped dressing rooms and rushed timelines had obliterated any sense of modesty long ago. No, it was something else, something new and alien that had Zayn twitching like a nerve raw and exposed. All his clothes lay piled at the end of the bed with his habitual disrobing complete and still he had to pause and breathe until he felt in sufficient control of himself.

Niall reclined upon his pillows and did not seem to notice the lapse, but then again Zayn never could tell for sure what Niall did or did not notice, what he kept close to his chest or discarded like jetsam. Their inner thoughts had never been on offer alongside their bodies. Clear delineations had long ago been made, and then Zayn left and there was nowhere left to draw any lines at all.

"Careful, mate, or you'll give me a big head, filling it with such pretty words."

A quick burst of laughter followed that Zayn hadn't known he had been starved for until the moment it was directed at him once more. He gorged himself on it until he felt nigh to bursting.

"Didn't think that was possible anymore up top," Zayn smirked at the blonde, a much more familiar moue. Where his lips curved into old habits, his body, his thoughts easily followed. Stepping his toes back from the precipice where they had perched at from his first step into the room, Zayn returned to solid ground and dove into bed beside Niall. The other, slighter body settled easily against his side, skin to skin, a synergistic warmth. His left hand grasped at the curve of Niall's hip while his right hand stole deeply under the covers. This was known territory. This he could traverse and manipulate. "Down here, however, is another matter, and I'm thinking I can give you a hand with that if you like."

A full body shiver ran up Niall's frame, like a guitar string plucked. "Yeah, I think I do like. Very much so."

The slow, languid rhythm that Zayn set matched the mood that settled over him, the ease of it. He said nothing, having nothing more to say. The air between them remained still and undisturbed. He hadn't felt in such control in a very long time.

"So—ugh—what's brought—huh—this on?" Even within his own pleasure, Niall wore his jester's smile and watched him with opaque, calculating eyes.

"What, don't you like this?" Zayn slowed his hand to a tortuous drag that pulled a huff and a whine out of Niall. "Could always stop if you're wanting to go back to sleep."

"No—no! 'M not complaining. Just, you seem a little...off, mate?"

"Off? How?" The up and down flick of Zayn's wrist sped up to match the quickening of his heartbeat.

"Dunno, you—uhh, right there—you usually get straight to it. And I don't—ahh—think you've ever given up a chance to pull to come see me before."

"I decided I wanted to do things a little differently this time around," Zayn said. The words dribbled out slowly, each one coalescing in his brain into shaky intent as he spoke them. "Is that alright?"

"More than." Niall shifted so that he faced him and cupped his hand around the back of Zayn's neck. The roughness of Niall's calluses dragged against the sensitive skin, weighty and real. Tilting his face down to meet Niall's rising one, their mouths touched beginning with a soft press of lips, a suggestion of sweetness and purity. Then the delving of tongues, seeking and deepening, the drinking in of each other.

Zayn's mouth dipped lower. The tip of his tongue traced the freckles and marks dotting the pale expanse, the bobbing adam's apple, the smooth line of Niall's collarbone. He went lower still and reached the point of Niall's heart, the skin there milky white and thrumming with life's blood just beneath the surface. Unmarked.

A light pressure applied, not enough to truly hurt, but steady. Water dripping upon rock; a relentless carving and sculpting. Niall's scent filled his nose and settled in the back of his throat. His warmth seeped into him. Purplish blood bloomed beneath Zayn's lips. It tasted like triumph.

He kissed the mark over and over, tongue laving fervently in between. More words bubbled up. Too many at once; half thoughts and jumbled contradictions and confessions, too new and malformed and vulnerable to be given a voice just yet. Smothered, stillborn. Perhaps tomorrow. Only groans and shudders of unintelligible pleasure squeezed past the blockage to spill freely from their ravenous mouths. They ate their fill of it and Niall drifted off to a sated sleep.

But Zayn remained awake. He stared up at the darkness of the ceiling, something like lightness, like contentment, though he'd never felt it long enough to know and recognize it, buoying his head. The smooth blond strands tickling his chin and the steady puff of breath on his chest anchored him to the moment, the fragile present the universe had seen fit to gift him with. He gathered Niall close, clasped the yielding skin and shifting bones tightly. Watched the other grumble and settle deeper into slumber. Nearly adrift in comfortable satisfaction but unable to shake the needling thought that if he didn't hold on, if he wasn't vigilant, Niall would float off into the night never to return.

Zayn only intended to be gone a short while. He slipped his arm out from under Niall, settled the unsuspecting head on the white pillow, and left the covers turned down expecting to return before the heat of his body had even a chance to dissipate. All of them wary of hotel hallways after the leak in Buenos Aires, he took the minute to to don his vest and jeans and shoes. No sense in trading a new set of scandalous photos for the ones he had narrowly avoided tonight if he could help it. Maybe he was foolish to want a photo of this moment now—they had a penchant for sidling into the wrong hands on the most inopportune occasions—but memory alone had proven so unreliable.

He slid his key card out of his back pocket and into the slot of his hotel room door. He crossed the floor over to the bed and picked up his phone. All so easily, nonchalantly, unwary. He hadn't yet turned around to leave when he heard the lock to his door click open. Later, he would replay this part and think about how the feel of his mobile phone, it's slim, cool weight, disappeared from his hand. The tropical heat and humidity let in by the open balcony faded to neutral nothingness. He was no longer stirred by the breeze. By the time he turned, with no sense of moving, he was face to face with himself.

With detached bewilderment, he watched his doppelganger dressed in the same white vest and black skinny jeans throw the same black mobile phone across the room to land face down on the floor. The other Zayn spared not another glance for the expensive electronic laid out so carelessly and made quick strides over to his suitcase.

 _What the fuck is going on?_ He might have screamed, or at least had the urge to scream, but no noise issued from illusory lips. When he thought to move, to block himself from piling his things so haphazardly in his luggage, he found he was confined to the small patch of carpet he inhabited. Even that no longer felt solid beneath him; he was suspended.

The door opened again unbeknownst to Zayn in the midst of his scrambling exodus. But  _he_ witnessed everything.

"Zayn, what're you doing? Is everything alright?"

Such a cold figure Zayn presented in the remote curve of his spine, the distant elevation of his shoulders. With his back firmly set on the other, Zayn did not see how Niall's smile slipped and the light dimmed in blue eyes. Still, the other battled valiantly on to reach Zayn, ever conciliatory. "If this is 'bout tonight—"

Even facing Niall, this Zayn was blind to anything but his own rage. His was a black hole that swallowed everything around it. "Tonight was nothing! And I can't—I _won't_  —stand here listening to _you_  of all people harping on about it.

How small and dark his eyes appeared, his dishevelled hair like the nest of some vermin from the rough treatment of his own hands. Heaving shoulders and spittle flying from a snarling mouth completed the picture of a vicious beast too dumb to understand its own destructive behaviour. Rending words that could never be unspoken punctuated the splintering of their relationship. 

_Slag. Pathetic. Fallback._

"Tell me, how's it feel to know that no one's ever really chose you either?"

Mortal blows after everything that had come to pass between them. The callous stroke of Zayn's finger over the mark he had left on Niall was the final perversion. All those bruises that would never heal.

"So this is how it ends, is it?

 _No._ But his howl was that of a phantom. Less than a sigh in the wind. Imperceptible to Zayn lost in the quagmire of his own selfishness, but there surrounding them nonetheless, haunting.

"Can't wish you unhappiness, mate. That's not me. But I do hope that you never forget this moment. Because you should know that I won't."

And now he knew for certain, until his end, neither would he.

* * *

The shrill ringing of his mobile wakes Zayn up. It seems only a nanosecond between the past and now. He's curled up like a child in the middle of his bed. His duvet and sheet are bunched up at the foot of it; his skin is bare and shivering from a cold that penetrates much deeper than that. The clear light of morning streams in through the slats of his blinds, a painful brightness. Zayn hits the answer button without checking the name and cradles the phone to his ear. He does not lift his head from its prone position on the mattress. He says nothing.

It's a woman's voice on the other end. No need to wait for him to speak. Perrie knows that he's there. She can hear him crying.

"Didn't I tell you that it would all be clearer in the morning?" 

**Author's Note:**

> This has been brewing for a while, since March 2015 to be exact. To set the mood, I listened to Moments on repeat while writing this. My writing's a bit rusty, so forgive any crappiness and factual errors.


End file.
